By Age 35 You Will Relate Way Too Well to This Depressing Meme

So I guess this is growing up.

This week’s meme of the moment is all about flexing a skill that definitely comes with age: the ability to make jokes about your own depressing life. The “By Age 35” meme has swept through Twitter, fueled by the kind of wrath that can only come from the first generation raised on the internet during a crippling recession.

It all started with a tone-deaf article on Market Watch, originally published on January 5. Entitled, “Money Milestones: This is how your finances should look in your 30s,” the story detailed how millennials should be putting a large chunk of their salary away now for retirement.

In May, Market Watch tweeted the story with an unfortunately pedantic caption:

It did not go over well. While the post was liked and retweeted thousands of times, it also inspired a wave of spoofs across the Twitterverse. Users took to lampooning Market Watch’s rhetoric. For a generation riddled by student debt and far from the mid-level careers that previous generations had attained by this age, saving half a “salary” can sound absurd.